How Your Brain Learns to Ride the Subway

The brain is a fantastic but finite machine. That is, the brain can be bogged down like an other computer when pushed to its limits. But some large part of what makes the brain marvelous is how it deals with those limits, e.g. how seemingly intractable neurocomputational problems can become reasonable through the on-the-fly invention of new algorithms. The results of these algorithms are often plans for future action in which some swamp of prohibitive complexity is navigated successfully and efficiently. Making sense of a subway network is one such example. Planning a trip through a vast web of stations and lines is a computationally complex task that quickly explodes as more lines and more stations are added. Understanding how the brain is able to pull this off without nuking…